3. Towards a new interpretation of the
Judeo-Spanish folk song survival

Cohens study, however, falls short from
treating the question of how and why the Judeo-Spanish or
Ladino repertoire transmitted orally by women survived
before the twentieth century within a male dominated,
patriarchal, religious and text-oriented community in a
Muslim context, far away from its Iberian origins. One
reason why this question was not addressed directly is
that modern ethnography takes for granted the central
role of women in the transmission of the Sephardi
tradition and excludes ethnohistorical sources. These
sources show us that between women and the spiritual
leadership of the Sephardi communities there was a
relation of : a) confrontation, i.e. rabbinical
opposition to women singing in general, and to the
singing of Judeo-Spanish traditional songs specifically,
and b) resistance, i.e. Sephardi women created their own
time and space for the performance of their songs.

Sephardi folk
singers living in Israel:
Loretta 'Dora' Gerassi (born in Bulgaria) and Bienvenida
'Berta' Aguado (born inTurkey)

Confrontation is rooted in the segregation of the
female singing voice, which is wider in scope than other
Jewish religious rules concerning female segregation,
such as those which relate to menstruation. Girls and
adult women do not menstruate and are therefore exempted
from the limitations imposed upon women by the rulings on
this issue, but they do sing. Sephardi women of all ages
engaged in the active, assertive behavior of singing as a
form of resistance, not as passive "vessels" of
song transmission, as Cohen (1995:182) described it.

Sephardi women often had no particular sense of being
limited in their choices by the traditional gendered
social system of Judaism, any more than men. Ethnographic
evidence attest the independent character of the Sephardi
womens musical activities. Ladino folk songs were
performed around the Mediterranean within the time and
space of womens activities, for audiences of women
and children, as a pastime (for example while nursing the
mother of a new baby during the days prior to the
circumcision) or accompanying chores such as laundry,
rocking babies and cooking. Sephardi men could certainly
hear their womens songs in those rituals related to
the life cycle where physical segregation was relaxed:
weddings and funerals (see Cohen 1980:86).

Susana Weich-Shahak (1984:30; forthcoming), who has
carried the most extensive ethnography of the Sephardi
folk song in Israel and abroad, reports the existence of
societies of female singers, usually called compañas,
which met once a week to sing together, each time in the
house of a different woman. These associations used to be
invited to weddings to cheer up the audience and they
were rewarded by the audiences for this deed. The
revenues of the society were usually invested in
donations for the trousseau of poor brides. There is
probably some relationship between these associations and
other, more formal, societies of singers in Sephardi
communities in the past, such as the hevrah
kadisha ("The company of kaddish
[singers]") which sang in burial processions and
weddings. When they sang at weddings in Morocco, these
companies included young girls too.

Some Sephardi women were renowned as cantaderas,
semiprofessional singers who accompanied themselves with
tambourines and frame-drums called pandero or panderico
in the Eastern Mediterranean or sonaja in North
Morocco. In Morocco one also finds among female singers
the use of castañetas (called castañuelas
or palillos, played rather
"unprofessionally" by using only one pair
hanging loose from the middle finger and activated by the
free hand), an obvious import from Southern Spain. Female
performers of percussion instruments in the Balkans and
Turkey were called tañaderas. It is interesting
to note that the female drummer-singer-dancer in Eastern
Mediterranean Hebrew culture as "indicative of a
much more extensive and important realm of female
activity that would otherwise be acknowledged" goes
back to Biblical times, as Meyers (1994) has pointed out
on the basis of recent archeological findings.

Sephardi female instrumentalists were not restricted
to playing percussion instruments only. The traveler
Victor Guerin, for example, witnessed in mid-nineteenth
century Rhodes how Sephardi girls and women used to meet
regularly at the fountain in the calle ancha
("wide street") and noticed that most of them
knew how to play "a guitar that resembled a Spanish
mandolin and accompanied singing and dancing at
celebrations" (1856, quoted in Angel 1987:100).
Weich-Shahak (personal communication) reports that the
playing of string instruments, the ud, the
mandolin, and even the qanun, was customary among
Eastern Sephardi women in the early 20th century.

Considering the available data, one can assume,
following Robertson (1987:242), that Sephardi women
"developed their own styles of communication and
intimacy", and "that these styles create bonds
that are often fortified by gender separatism in
male-centered societies" (see also Magrini 1995). We shall now investigate
under which social conditions these developments took
place.